Archives for February, 2009

Maybe not nearly as long as many anthropologists believe. That’s the thesis of Gregory Cochran’s controversial book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, which Gregory discusses with ScienceBlogger Razib Khan of Gene Expression in this week’s Science Saturday. They also talk about how the evolution of lactose tolerance might explain why Indo-European languages are widespread, whether the…

Last weekend, a letter from acting NIH director Raynard S. Kington was distributed to NIH investigators and began making the rounds in the blogosphere as well. The letter detailed specific plans for the $8.2 billion of NIH funding included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package. ScienceBloggers immediately expressed fear that a dramatic…

When considering the virality of internet memes—that is, the likelihood that a given item of web goodness will be passed from one person to another as fast as you can press Control+C, Control+V and send—there are many theories as to what causes these explosions of web transference. But examining pieces of Internet phenomena from the…

The Washington Post is facing criticism after refusing to issue a correction for an erroneous statistic cited by Op-Ed columnist George Will’s column topic—that global sea ice levels are the same as they were in 1979. The statistic was summoned to support his column’s viewpoint that global warming effects are exaggerated by “eco-pessimists.” The statistic…

In this week’s Science Saturday, blogger and astronomer Phil Plait chats with science journalist Carl Zimmer. They talk about the time Buzz Aldrin punched a moon-landing denialist in the face, how consumer-culture gadgetry can serve the cause of science, the death of newspapers in the Internet age, and the big questions in astronomy that Phil…

Thursday, February 19 ScienceBlogger Bora Zivkovic from A Blog Around the Clock gave a presentation on open science as part of a panel discussion at Columbia University in New York City. The event, titled “Open Science: Good for Research, Good for Researchers?” was organized by the Scholarly Communication Program and also featured presentations by Jean-Claude…

Today is Friday the 13th, and things are getting a little bit weird here at ScienceBlogs. I mean, birds wearing backpacks? The possibility of a Neandertal genome sequenced? Scicurious talking about co… oh wait, that’s actually pretty normal. If we were superstitious though, we might think there was something to all of this.

The author of the 1998 paper that fueld the anti-vaccination movement by asserting a link between MMR vaccinations and autism was recently found to have falsified his original data. The Sunday Times reports that the study’s author Andrew Wakefield “changed and misreported results in his research” which was originally published in The Lancet medical journal…

In this week’s Science Saturday, George Johnson chats with Louisa Guilder, author of The Age of Entanglement, about the history and science of quantum entanglement and why we should care about conversations between great physicists decades ago. They also discuss the latest alarming twist on self-publishing and the recent news about experiments in quantum teleportation.

While anacondas and pythons, the largest known snakes alive today, can reach over 30 feet long and swallow antelope whole, they are dwarfed in size by the newly discovered Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a serpent that lived during the Paleocene epoch whose bones were unearthed recenty in a Colombia coal mine. By analyzing the snake’s vertebrae, paleontologists…